Firms That Hire The Most MBA Interns

by John A. ByrnePoets & QuantsAuthor on November 28, 2011

Who hires MBA students for summer internships from the top business schools? Pretty much the exact same firms that end up hiring them. An analysis by Poets&Quants of the top employers of MBA interns at 18 leading business schools shows that McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte Consulting, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bain & Co., and Amazon are the top six hirers of MBA intern talent.

McKinsey hired 188 interns from just 11 schools; BCG, 138 from 11 schools; Deloitte, 119 from 13 schools; J.P. Morgan, 103 from 12 schools; Bain 95 from eight schools, and Amazon 94 from 10 schools. The analysis covers only hires from companies who were among the top ten or 12 employers of interns at leading business schools, including Wharton, Kellogg, Booth, MIT Sloan, Tuck, and Fuqua. Harvard, Stanford, Yale, NYU and Carnegie Mellon were excluded from the study because they fail to provide this information.

Nevertheless, the analysis shows which business school graduates specific companies favor, along with how active they are in the MBA job market. That’s highly valuable information to applicants who may have their hearts set on working for a specific company. Obviously, your odds of getting a job at Apple improve if you go to one of the schools where Apple is among the top hiring companies of MBA and MBA interns. Incidentally, it may surprise some to learn that Apple took its most interns during the summer of 2011 from Duke University’s Fuqua School, where CEO Tim Cook had earned his MBA: nine MBA students.

Some 11 of the 18 MBA interns PepsiCo took on this past summer were from MIT Sloan. Goldman Sachs scooped up two dozen MBA students as interns–more than any other school in the study–from Wharton. Cummins hired 18 interns from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and none from any of these other top business schools. Amazon employed 16–the most from any single school– from the University of Michigan’s Ross School and 14 from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. Target’s favorite school? MIT Sloan which supplied 11 of its MBA interns last summer, more than any other reporting business school.

Increasingly, many firms–particularly those in finance and consulting–use summer internships as tryouts for MBA students. At both Kellogg and Berkeley’s Haas School, nearly one in every four graduates in the Class of 2011 went to work for the company that employed them over the summer as interns.

Companies fall in and out of these business school employment reports each year based on their own needs, the enthusiasm of MBA students, and fads. Among the top hirers of interns at MIT Sloan, for example, were two new companies this year: Booz & Co. and Goldman Sachs. Dropping off this year’s list Apple, Biogen, Hubspot and Liberty Mutual, each of which hired four MBA interns a year earlier.

Consulting firms were the most aggressive of all the recruiters of MBA interns, followed by financial firms and then technology outfits. After Amazon, the largest single hirer of MBA interns from these top schools was Google which employed 63 students from nine schools; Microsoft, 54 interns from eight schools; Apple, 29 from five schools, and Dell, 26 from three schools. Other prominent companies in the MBA intern hunt were Johnson & Johnson, which hired 54 interns from nine schools, PepsiCo, which brought aboard 18 summer interns from three schools, and General Electric, which hired 16 interns from four schools.

Interesting. According to the article, Tuck did not do as well as its peers in MBA intern placement in finance. Only Barclays and Citigroup? That is very surprising.

http://poetsandquants.com/members/jbyrne/ John A. Byrne

Trance parent,

Again, the study is based on what the schools disclose–generally a list of 10 of the top 10 to 12 employers by the number of grads they hire as interns or as full-time employees. So Goldman and Morgan also probably hired Tuck grads but not in the numbers that would have put them among Tuck’s top employers.

AJK

stern placed a lot more students in consumer products than i would have thought. what type of roles did they fill? were they more finance related (treasury/corp dev) marketing, or general management like leadership rotational programs?

AJK

sorry, meant to post this in a different one of today’s articles. you can ignore my above comment

Are these numbers based on offers or people accepting jobs? I’m not sure how helpful this information is if its jobs because even two or three candidates for one firm at one school could change the numbers significantly for reasons having little to do with either the school or the company. Offer data on the other hand would would be quite interesting.

http://poetsandquants.com/members/jbyrne/ John A. Byrne

Ugh,

Actual job acceptances.

MBA Aspirant

How do you guys evaluate one’s chances to land an internship at Amazon from a Top 50 school?